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What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to work 80 hour weeks? Also is the salary high? Or is it one of those jobs where juniors employees h

• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• oflanac52 6y ago
  According to a website "efinancialcareers" or something, I think first could be getting £90k, and that before the bonus. And yes that is very IMO but in their career trajectory it seems to be small.
  • albertgoeswoof 6y ago
    For someone in their early 20s in the UK, that is a massive salary
    • kowlo 6y ago
      For someone of any age, that is a massive salary. Average salary in UK is £36k
      • gambiting 6y ago
        Literally on another thread someone(American) was trying to tell me that if you don't make at least $150k/year as a dev you should immediately quit and find another job. I was just like.....are you familiar with the pay levels in the UK lol? It's incredibly hard to cross the £100k/year barrier as a dev, with some very rare exceptions, nearly all of them in the financial industry and down in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is).
        • OJFord 6y ago
          > in London(and yes, then you're paying £3k/month for a flat, so I'm not sure it's such a lavish salary as people think it is). A £3k/month flat is certainly lavish. Or at least sized for two incomes. (And even then, probably a nice a place in zone 1. Did that figure come from actually looking for places, or just exaggeration to make a point? I mean, of course you can spend that much and far more, but it's by no means the entry point is all I'm saying.)
          • gambiting 6y ago
            No, I have friends living in London. Yes the prices drop down quickly further out, but if you're doing 14 hour days you don't want to commute for an hour each way. I have a friend who used to rent a flat pretty much opposite Facebook's office, paid £2800/month for a 1-bed studio. Know someone else who works for a law firm in the City, he pays dead on £3000/month for a flat but he's 2 minutes away from the office and pays for that convenience. And yes, I know someone who lives in Ealing, but a 2-bed flat(not a house) is still £1900/month, and the commute was 45 minutes each way on the tube.
            • winterismute 6y ago
              I live in London as well and what you are depicting is more or less correct but a bit distorted in the general view imho: for example, you can live near the West Hampstead area and be in the city (city thameslink or farringdon thameslink stations) in 20 mins, however a good flat with one bedroom would cost you 1400 (even less after covid) and you would be in a quiet street next to lively areas, well connected and with a lot of green spaces at reach. And this is only an example. The 2.6-3k flats in the "center" are fundamentally "laziness-scams" for people who don't want or don't like to search for alternatives and are ok with living next to no real green spaces and with the constant background noises of cranes and construction works; the 3k/mo "luxury flat" costs little more than 2k, plus 90? per month of communiting in a nice area in zone 2, you don't need to go to ealing.
            • sweeneyrod 6y ago
              You absolutely can find a 1-bed in super-central London for well under £2000/month, e.g. it took 2 minutes searching to find this one https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_identifier=4e794b541d048312b8447ff2c1da50d1 https://ww2.zoopla.co.uk/to-rent/details/57988484/?search_id... But furthermore, you can find 2-beds in the same location for around £2000/month (I live in one). Suggestions that an analyst at GS or an E3 at FB earning 70-100k isn't actually that well off because rents are high are silly, if they're struggling how is someone on a more normal grad salary of 35k supposed to be coping?
      • noir_lord 6y ago
        And even that average paints a strange picture (it's distorted by high earners). Median household income is £29.9K (and some households have two or more earners). Full time minimum wage is ~£15K a year. I look over the pond and see what people with my level of experience are earning and think "damn, I'm under paid" then I look at at the median household income and think damn I'm way over paid.
        • kowlo 6y ago
          I agree. If someone tells me they're on £36k, I think they're on a decent salary in the UK.
    • 0xy 6y ago
      No it's not, it's barely above minimum wage when you consider hours worked. Not to mention the job dangers (stress/burnout/health impacts).
      • beojan 6y ago
        It would be more than £10 per hour even if you worked 168 hours a week.
      • beforeolives 6y ago
        Your calculation is way off. The living wage in London (not minimum for the UK) is £10.85 per hour. That's £45136 at 80 hours a week (the cap they're asking for in the article) and £53599 at 95 hours a week (which they are supposedly averaging now). £90k is a long way to go from there.
        • notahacker 6y ago
          Glassdoor puts Goldman's junior analyst basic salary at just over £50k though, which actually is below minimum wage at the hours quoted in this article...
          • beforeolives 6y ago
            That's a good point. I have no idea what their actual salaries are. I was responding to the suggestion that £90k a year is just above minimum wage when you adjust for the hours worked (which is false).
          • sweeneyrod 6y ago
            "analyst" covers all entry-level roles. The analysts with total compensation close to the base salary of 50k (e.g. developers) won't work crazy hours. The bankers who do have crazy hours also get bonuses with order of magnitude equal to the base salary.
          • dan-robertson 6y ago
            £50k base for a random IB in London doesn’t sound shockingly low to me. There’s two things there: 1. Pay in general is lower in the UK than the US. The bank will pay what they can get away with and there isn’t enough competition between banks/consultancies/tech/law to drive pay up. I wouldn’t be surprised if more competitive candidates got higher offers. 2. A lot of compensation can be made up in bonuses, though I don’t know what kind of bonus a junior analyst might get.
    • alexc05 6y ago
      I was a teacher in England in my 30's and my starting salary was something like £18k. £90k was something that you'd take 10 or 20 years to get to.
      • arcturus17 6y ago
        You can make £90k as a teacher in England?
        • alexc05 6y ago
          IIRC it was what you'd get to as an assistant headteacher with headteacher at just over 100k at the top of the scale. Though this was nearly 15 years ago so I could be misremembering
    • exdsq 6y ago
      To be fair I reached £130k at 26 without a degree by working remotely for a company in the Bay Area - it’s not impossible but you do have to prioritise money. Ended up giving it up for a lower salary that’s more interesting work anyway; ended up money wasn’t everything!
  • fakedang 6y ago
    I know of elite boutiques that pay at around $70k. Efinancialcareers has a habit of mixing up numbers and overestimating.
• bacbilla 6y ago
  These are typically junior bankers working on M&A/IPO deals. The ones working on the desks/trading will have much more moderate 45-60 hour weeks with little/no weekend work. The salaries sound high - but bearing in mind that you will need to live within very close proximity to the financial centre of the city (London City, Canary Wharf, Wall Street etc) you do not end up with much spending money at the end of the month. You may well have a comparable salary as a relatively junior FAANG developer with a lot less effort.
  • brmgb 6y ago
    > These are typically junior bankers working on M&A/IPO deals. M&A has always been notorious for the insane hours it pushes on interns and junior employees and most of them use it signalling to land much more balanced job in management consulting or other parts of finance (unless they really want the money because there definitely is money to be made there). The royal track of an internship in audit/large finance department followed by one in M&A then a job at Mckinsey was very much still in the head of some when I was business school student. Also finance is known to have a peculiar culture and use gruelling first years has a filter. Some consulting companies do it too. I personally find it stupid and therefore elected to work for a more sensible place but it is real however. Still contrary to what another commenter implied this is not a grind. Things become more normal after the first hurdle and these companies reward in a way which is not particularly dissimilar to any other big companies (a mix of making yourself visible and intelligently playing the political game).
• thu2111 6y ago
  What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to work 80 hour weeks? Nothing worth it. I've talked to people who have been through the investment bank meat grinder and who got out. One guy went to Silicon Valley. He said tech firms have their own issues but treat him far better. The gist is: there's a culture of abusive working practices that appears to have becomes self-perpetuating in the way that hazing rituals at US colleges or the army sometimes do. Much of the work is horrendously inefficient, for example, writing long reports for managers that are then never read, or which are read and then ignored, or in which only a single figure is actually needed. Other problems involve managers who have no idea what they want so constantly change their requirements, causing work to be scrapped and redone, but with arbitrary and ludicrous deadlines attached. Additionally managers think nothing of setting someone a new task to write a large report at 9pm on Friday night, then demanding it be delivered to their private home at 6am on Saturday morning. Because the workers are young and ambitious, they tolerate this even though they can see that a lot of it is work for work's own sake. And presumably the only ones who make it are the ones who have become inured to the notion that arbitrary work is some measure of self-worth, and thus try to select "the best" by pushing people to the limits and seeing who breaks. This culture is entirely absent in tech, where if someone is asked to do a task there's a general expectation that the task actually matters and has been thought about - at least a little bit.
  • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
    > He said tech firms have their own issues but treat him far better Did he mention what those issue are?
    • thu2111 6y ago
      I only vaguely recall the conversation. I think they were cultural. Tech was more full of people who genuinely bought their own hype, even when it was self-evidently ridiculous. Basically the sort of issues that the show Silicon Valley picked up on. It wasn't anything super serious from a work/life balance perspective. More of the "feel" of the place.
  • gambiting 6y ago
• raverbashing 6y ago
  > What do junior workers do at these banks that require them to work 80 hour weeks? Preparing reports, power point presentations and playing with Excel spreadsheets that will be looked for 5min then set aside as the negotiation politics come to play
• notahacker 6y ago
  They're the junior analyst on a deal rather than a junior analyst, and the client and their boss expect the updates complete by tomorrow's meeting. The banks could certainly afford to train an extra analyst, but a lot of the work is drudgery updating single documents where it's easier to let one half awake person deal with it than divide it between two. Junior analysts don't usually push back on requests, and banks don't ask clients to wait a bit longer whilst they get things ready either. The salary is high, but not more than two professional jobs for top grads high. They are eligible for bonuses though, and that carrot of six figure salaries is dangled.
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > banks don't ask clients to wait a bit longer whilst they get things ready To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from one tomorrow. Doing all this with reasonable working hours isn't impossible--it just requires a global, co-ordinated team. "Why not hire more analysts?", you may ask. Well, who will pay for them? If you take it out of the senior bankers' pay, they'll quit. Start their own firm. People will work those hours, and they'll find them, and they'll take a bunch of their clients with them. If the house pays for it, shareholders protest. Why is ROE falling? Why are fixed costs so high when you had a dry year? It's a collective-action problem likely only addressable by regulation. That or litigation.
    • notahacker 6y ago
      > To be fair, the clients are paying the banks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for this work. And the work is time sensitive--a bond offering today may price differently from one tomorrow. I get that, even though though the closest I've come is having a banker struggle to keep it civil as I passed on the message that no we couldn't just fudge the asset valuation after the client admitted at the last minute they'd supplied us with an incorrect detail, and no our analysts were going to do it tomorrow, not this evening. But as they stood to earn four orders of magnitude more than we did from them and actually had more competition they weren't in the same position to tell the client that we weren't going to drop everything to rectify their error. I thought the division of labour problem was more of an issue than a salary at the entry level though, not so much because a pitchbook can't be handed to a suitably qualified employee on a different continent to finish but because they don't trust that setup. Dividing the pie between more senior bankers is obviously going to cause consternation, but surely a few extra graduate analysts isn't going to dramatically affect Goldman's bottom line, especially if they can cut those entry level salaries a bit and still retain more?
• chrisgd 6y ago
  Pitchbook for a CEO that details stats about several start ups intheir space that might make good acquisition targets. Pitch book that details financial implications of acquiring a publicly traded company where all the details are available - what the balance sheet looks like post merger, earnings, revenue, synergies. Private equity backed company is for sale, we need to show them every deal we have worked on in the past 10 years that is similar to the company for sale so we can prove we can sell it. Who is going to buy it, how much can they pay, who do we know at the buyer firm to get a quick decision. Formatting pitch books is bouncing back and forth between excel and PowerPoint to make sure all info is correct and sokmetimes you are waiting on others to do there part before you can move forward. Group head tells VP who tells associate who tells analyst and it flows back and forth before getting back to group head who screams “what the duck is this?”
• deleted 6y ago
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• rory 6y ago
  I have a couple friends that went this path and one reason for the absurd hours seems to be that their work needs to be done in between the times the boss is working. A more senior analyst will hand off analysis to be done overnight or on a weekend, and expect it back the next morning. But there's also an expectation to keep up appearances / "be available" during the day. So they spend most of the work day either making work for themselves or doing nothing, then work their real full-time job after normal office hours.